Control: reassign 924401 base-passwd,base-files
Control: clone 924401 -1
Control: reassign -1 Essential packages only provide functionality after being
configured
Control: tags -1 patch
Hi all,
Trimming the recipient list to just the relevant maintainers and those who
proposed and (I believe) seconded a change.
This is a very long bug with a *ton* of very useful information about
bootstrapping Debian that I hope someone will capture and document
somewhere, but after reviewing the whole thing, I believe there is only
one actionable change for Policy buried in the middle of it. It's also
currently assigned to three different packages, and I certainly don't feel
entitled to close the broader issue by applying that change. Therefore,
I'm going to remove debian-policy from this bug, and create a new bug to
handle just the proposed Policy change discussed below.
(For what it's worth, I love Guillem's idea of converting more maintainer
scripts into declarative metadata and getting out of the problen that
way.)
Helmut Grohne <hel...@subdivi.de> writes:
> I think at least Guillem and Santiago were arguing that policy should
> not be applied to bootstrap. While I don't like that view, I do find it
> reasonable. It can be made explicit in section 3.8 quite easily:
> Since dpkg will not prevent upgrading of other packages while an
> ``essential`` package is in an unconfigured state, all ``essential``
> packages must supply all of their core functionality even when
> -unconfigured. If the package cannot satisfy this requirement it must not
> +unconfigured after being configured at least once.
> +If the package cannot satisfy this requirement it must not
> be tagged as essential, and any packages depending on this package must
> instead have explicit dependency fields as appropriate.
This change looks correct to me based on the discussion in the bug but I
don't know enough to independently confirm that. I believe Santiago
effectively seconded this change in:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=924401#91
It needs one more second. Ideally, I'd like this to be someone else who
has a lot of understanding of the semantics of essential packages
(Guillem, for instance). Alas, due to the ordering of the BTS actions,
you may have to hunt down the cloned bug against debian-policy to second
it.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
